When put against AV-Test's "WildList" collection of 3,194 recent, common viruses, bots, and worms, Microsoft Security Essentials detected and removed each and every one of the malware samples. How does this compare to other security products? AV-Test coordinator Andreas Marx notes that "several other [antivirus] scanners are still not able to detect and kill all of these critters yet." In addition, Microsoft Security Essentials put up a perfect score with zero false positives—it didn't flag a single clean file as being malicious.

I installed this on release day on a Vista and XP machine.So far so good, obviously its early days. I might test it out with some the viruses collected from my honeypot to check some detection of common malware etc.

Ketchup, I am of the same opinion as you with regards Symantec and McAfee. I have installed Security Essentials on my Win7 box and it looks pretty good so far. It doesn't seem to trash the machine at all.

The only thing that I have to think about now is relying on the default Windows firewall, I haven't done that it years...